The human angle

Saul David reviews Mussolini's Island by John Follain.

Saul David

12:01AM BST 11 Sep 2005

The battle for Sicily in 1943, the first Allied invasion of continental Europe, is one of the least celebrated campaigns of the Second World War. This was mainly because, in the words of a War Office action report, it was a "strategic and tactical failure", a chaotic and deplorable example of "everything that planning should not be". The island was eventually taken, but at a cost of 20,000 Allied casualties and not before more than 115,000 Axis troops had been allowed to escape to the mainland with their heavy equipment. A pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.

Mussolini's Island is not, the dustjacket informs us, a "conventional military history". Instead John Follain, a former Rome correspondent for the Sunday Times, has concentrated on the human angle, telling the story from the perspective of eight main participants, including three British officers, General Patton 's private secretary, a nine-year-old Italian girl and a German panzer soldier. Such an approach has its advantages, giving the reader a bird's-eye view of the vicious fighting. It is impossible not to be moved, for example, by 21-year-old Lieutenant David Fenner's memory of the desperate battle for Primosole Bridge, where his Durham brigade suffered more than 500 casualties. "Cratered with shell holes," writes Follain, "the place was littered with German parachute equipment, torn blood-stained clothing, belts of ammunition and broken rifles - and German and British corpses."

Follain does a good job of explaining why Churchill, despite American misgivings, was so determined to invade Sicily in the first place: victory would, he believed, not only provide a "stepping-stone for landings on the Italian mainland, where they would seek to overthrow Mussolini, but also help the Allies control shipping routes in the Mediterranean". Thereafter, however, the course of the fighting, and of Allied strategy in general, is rarely clear. Although we learn a great deal about individual actions, we are not led to understand their wider significance.

And the book has another weakness. It relies too heavily on the 60-year-old recollections of its chief participants. The adventures of one of them, a downed British pilot named Tony Snell, may all be true. But having interviewed scores of Second World War veterans, I am not entirely convinced by the over-dramatised account of Snell's exploits behind enemy lines, especially his narrow brush with death at the hands of a German execution squad. Nor does the escape account of the panzer soldier, Werner Hahn, always ring true: would a much larger group of American paratroops really have helped him and his crew camouflage their Tiger tank (instead of taking them prisoner)? And is it likely that Hahn's superior officer went by the Jewish name of Goldschmidt?

When Follain does concentrate on the wider picture, it is very effective. We are given fascinating insights into the characters of the two competing Allied generals, Montgomery and Patton, such as the latter's use of uncharacteristically coarse language to gee up his troops. Patton, it seems, was also putting on a "performance" when he infamously slapped and abused a hospitalised US soldier he suspected of malingering, "knowing that word of the episode would spread among the troops". Oddly, Follain fails to mention the postscript to this incident: that it cost Patton the command of an Army group during the Normandy landings of 1944.

The sections on Hitler and Mussolini are also well done, particularly their summit meeting in mid-campaign when the Italian dictator listened patiently to his German counterpart's lengthy tirade. Even better is Follain's gripping account of the Fascist Grand Council's decision to strip Mussolini of his powers on July 25. At any moment Il Duce could have summoned his guard and had the council arrested. One member was so convinced he would not leave the chamber alive that he went armed with two hand grenades. Yet a strangely supine Mussolini chose not to act, and it would take a daring rescue by German commandos to restore a vestige of his former power.

The Sicilian campaign was not entirely without merit. It did provide, as Churchill had hoped, a launchpad for a mainland invasion and it did help to knock Italy out of the war. Yet the subsequent Italian campaign was a costly stalemate, and Follain is right to conclude that the "road to Berlin did not start on the beaches of Sicily but on those of Normandy a year later".

If you like your history visceral, emotive and first-hand, then this is the book for you; those who prefer a cooler, more measured approach are advised to look elsewhere.

Saul David's 'Mutiny at Salerno 1943' is now available in paperback (Conway Maritime)